


Let's Say The Devil Is Played By Two Men

by meanwhiletimely



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-16
Updated: 2012-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 03:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3554036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanwhiletimely/pseuds/meanwhiletimely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You've always been the kind of man to stare unblinking into darkness, but somehow you never thought the darkness would stare back.</i>
</p><p>Sebastian Moran meets a man at a bar. The results are rather explosive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Say The Devil Is Played By Two Men

_Once upon a time,_ says Jim, _there was a boy afraid of tigers._

_Once upon a time there was a boy afraid of tigers, but this isn't a story about a boy._

_This is a story about tigers._

* * *

You've always been the kind of man to stare unblinking into darkness, but somehow you never thought the darkness would stare back.

Yellow eyes and blazing skin like streaked fire and teeth sharp enough to cut through bone – but a well-timed shot can take down _anything_ , anything at all.

You will wear one of the teeth around your neck, just below the scar, and years later Jim Moriarty will scrape it along the old wound until it bleeds.

* * *

Jim Moriarty doesn't exist. He's a ghost story. A fairytale. A bad dream.

_What's he look like?  
Well, nobody knows, do they? Nobody lives long enough to tell._

You know.  
You know too well.  
You know, truth be told, a bit too much.

* * *

The man sitting across from you at the bar is shrouded in shadow, light from your cigarettes flickering dimly across forgettable, soft features, and when you blow smoke directly into his face—pale, against a shock of dark hair—he looks up, looks you over, smiles. His smile makes you want to hurt him. His smile makes you think he'd let you.

"That how you ask me to buy you a drink?" he drawls in a deliberate working-class accent, one thin eyebrow arching upwards with a suggestive smirk. The air of a rich man trying to seem like a poor man – you know that air, it's your air, you breathe the same air. Something off. Something strange. Something savagely compelling.

"You know," he's saying, "you really don't have to ask," and you accept the whiskey (Irish, just the way you like it – you really didn't have to ask), because drinks aren't cheap, even at this dingy London hellhole, and scum is scum.

"What's your talent?" asks the man, light fingers tap-tap-tapping against his own leg, shadowed in the dark. "What are you _good_ at?"

"Killing," you say archly, and don't add, _Not much else._

The man sitting across from you at the bar shifts a little, into the light, and you see his eyes for the first time: black, blacker than his hair, blacker than the card between his outstretched fingers.

"Then you're in luck." He says it in a theatrical whisper, in an entirely different accent: "I know someone who could use a killer."

You take the card.

Black, with an engraved phone number and a large gold _M_.

When you tear your eyes away at last, the man sitting across from you at the bar is gone.

* * *

You keep the card. You go back to the bar – again, again, again. Alone, and not alone.

You're at a table doing business with a large, muscular man and a thin man with a scar. That's all you know about them. That's all you want to know. The card falls out of your wallet, and everything goes still.

" _Moriarty_ ," the man with the scar is saying – whispering, really, breath caught somewhere between reverence and fear. "That's Moriarty's card. How did you get Moriarty's card?"

"What's Moriarty?" The word is acid on your tongue.

The muscular man laughs, but the man with the scar cringes at the name. Looks around. Beckons you closer. Says it almost worshipfully: "The most dangerous man in London."

The muscular man scoffs and looks at you both with knowing scorn. "Moriarty don't exist. He's a ghost story. This?" He picks up the card. "Some green bottom-feeder had himself a real good day."

"You lot ain't heard the stories I heard," says the man with the scar, shaking his head, _shaking._ "Those ain't ghost stories."

You hear the stories. You stand up. You take the card back.

The man with the scar looks up at you, something like awe on his mangled face. "You gonna call?"

You don't answer. You exit the bar. You text a message. When the devil sends a messenger to pluck you from a throng of hungry sinners, you don't ask why.  
You really don't have to ask.

* * *

At the designated address, you wait. You wait, and wait, and wait. You finally realize – there's someone in the shadows. Perhaps he's been waiting on you.

Your trigger finger twitches. "Into the light where I can see you, sir."

A short, nondescript man with a shock of dark slicked-back hair against pale skin and thin, arched brows steps into the light - unarmed, and by the looks of him he's never held a gun in his life; administrative work, then, and well-paid work too if the bespoke suit is any indication - bloodshot black eyes curiously blank and dead.

The man from the bar, the man you've been waiting for.  
His smile, this time, is all teeth.

" _Sir,_ " he repeats in that same soft voice, in a new, unfamiliar accent. Irish, like the whiskey. His eyes don't leave yours. "You're a military man. _Former Colonel Sebastian Moran._ A soldier without a cause."

"I'm no soldier." Not anymore, maybe not ever. It's the easiest lie you've ever told.

"A tiger, then," says the dark man. "A tiger—without a master."

"Tigers don't have masters. Tigers rip your throat out, _sir_."

His black eyes flicker down deliberately to the scar visible just above your collarbone—white, like a ghostly hangman's rope. "Not yours."

You meet his gaze, stoic and unflinching. "Not mine."  
You step forward.

When you wrap your hand twice around that heinously expensive tie and _pull,_ his dead black eyes flare eerily to life. "You can tell your _boss_ ," you growl, pulling harder, choking, but still he doesn't make a sound, "I'm not like the others. He speaks to me himself or he doesn't speak to me at all."

When you release him, he massages his throat with light fingers and calmly straightens his tie. "I could do that," he agrees pleasantly, soft voice a little hoarse, "or—" His black eyes flicker up to meet yours, thin lips creeping upward in a slow, unnerving smile. "—you could always tell me yourself."

 _Shit._ You stagger backwards, reeling. _Shit shit shit._ You look him over with new eyes: _the most dangerous man in London_ , wasn't that what they said, and he likes to play dangerous games. His throat is red, rubbed raw where you choked him. Your fingers tighten on your gun.

"Moriarty."

"Jim," he says simply, extending a hand. You hesitate, then take it. His fingers, when they close around yours, are smooth and uncalloused, as soft as his voice. "I have a job for you," he's saying, stroking the scars at the back of your hand. "You're going to shoot a man."

"I don't shoot men, sir." _Anymore, anymore._

" _Well_ ," says Jim Moriarty. His voice has changed again. "What's a man, after a tiger?"

There are criminals and then there are _criminals._ This man is neither.  
This is a man worth killing for.

* * *

You're perched on the edge of a very tall building, the city all alight below you. You aim. You aim.

He's crept up behind you with a predatory, reptilian grace and leans in close enough for you to feel hot breath caressing your skin, the hairs of your neck all at end as he exhales in a sharp hiss: "Am I distracting you?"

Your eyes remain cool and focused on the target, but your hand shakes a little as you pull the trigger, and you feel his breath catch in his throat as the bullet still hits its mark. When it's done, there's a feverish glint in his eyes.

"What do you want, _Boss_?"

He tilts his head slightly to the side, considering you, then you're flush against the wall, gun forgotten on the floor, his lips at your ear murmuring a new, surprising order: "Distract me."

Perhaps not so surprising after all.

Your body comes alive for him—there's this staggering thrill, this dangerous rush in your veins, and when he offers his mouth, you bite. Fingernails rake against skin, leaving jagged red marks in their wake, and your new master leans in, purring, "Stripes, Sebastian. _Stripes._ "

* * *

Jim doesn't get his hands dirty, but he's so good at dirtying yours.

You excel at violence. You're built for it. Jim is a _brain_ and the rest of him is just set dressing, but _you_ —you're a body; you're a weapon. You've gone through fire and come out stripped to the core of human nature. Jim has no need for human nature to begin with.

Jim doesn't need fire to ignite his own savagery.

Jim _starts_ fires; Jim _fixes_ fires.

(Jim can fix anything, but no one can fix Jim.)

It's the eyes—the _eyes_ , that's what's most unsettling. There's something profoundly sinister and desolate lurking underneath those dead black orbs, something coiled and lethal that you don't want to disturb—though you expect someone will have to, eventually.

You expect he's waiting for it.

( _What do you dream about,_ you ask him once—just once—and he turns that faraway gaze on you, black eyes glinting in the faint light, mouth half-open with what might be feigned surprise, and says, _Oblivion_.)

* * *

Stripped of his expensive suits, without his _costumes,_ Jim Moriarty is thin and fragile and deceptively human. You want to cover every inch of him with bruises, paint all that translucent white skin with purples and yellows and blues—but nothing can hurt Jim, not really, not when the circuitry of his mind is burning hotter than any veins scorched with blood, than any clean lines and taut flesh, than any seared skin and tears.

He is a blur of manic, focused energy, exaggerated smile dripping with derision and disdain, black eyes black hair black soul. And there it is again, something else, that something else behind his eyes, lurking somewhere deep in all that blackness, madness simmering so close to the surface you can _taste_ it—right there, right there on his tongue.

(He tastes like smoke and sin.  
You wonder how much of the smoke is yours; how much of the sin is his.  
You decide it doesn't matter.)

You press hard fingers against his pulse points and _squeeze,_ holding his heart in your hands, and all he does is hiss: "You're a gun, you're just another one of your guns, and when I pull the trigger— _BOOM._ " You hit him hard across the mouth so that when he smiles his sharp white teeth are streaked red with blood, and he laughs and laughs and laughs.

_Is that all? Is that everything?_

Not everything. Not yet.

* * *

You're cleaning and polishing your guns, taking apart the pieces and putting them back together again, when your employer sets down his phone.

"What would you do if I ordered you to shoot me, Sebastian?" It's Sebastian, today, then. Jim is in a good mood. Someone has likely just died. You open your mouth.

"I would shoot you."

"You _would_ , wouldn't you?" He's smiling, delighted. "You would."

"Do you want me to shoot you, Boss?" You imagine, not for the first time, putting a bullet through Jim Moriarty's twisted, brilliant brain. Imagine it splattering all over his suits, all over your hands. The blood. The blood.

"Not today, darling." Cold fingers trace the veins down your shooting arm, feeling like knives on your skin. "Not today."

* * *

Only once do you go back to the bar.

It's business, it's pleasure, it's all the same, these days, but these days the rest of its patrons see you – you in your new suits, with those priceless guns in your pockets, with that glint, that _glint_ in your eye – and you see fear.

They whisper about _you,_ now.

_Moriarty's man._

_Second in command._

_The second most dangerous man in London._

The city is yours.

( _Ours_ , Jim's voice corrects in your head, but you know he doesn't mean it. Jim doesn't want to own a city. Jim doesn't want to own anything.)

(What you really mean is, Jim doesn't want to own _you_.)

* * *

The pill box is empty and the pistol is loaded.

"Good god, you're so dull, Moran. So dull, so predictable, so _ordinary._ " He impales that last word with venomous intensity, mouth curling upwards into a sneer, and you sit very, very still. "You're ordinary," he says again, turning away at last, dropping the gun, and if you didn't know any better you'd say it sounded a whole fucking lot like envy.

It's not.

* * *

There's a detective. The Virgin, Jim calls him. He's everything.

(He's everything you can't be; he's everything you're not.)

You watch him slip on underwear so bright they're nearly blinding.

"For your Virgin," you say – a question that's not a question – and Jim bares sharp teeth.

"For my Virgin." He doesn't say it, but you hear it all the same: mine. mine. mine.

Jim's black eyes light up like supernovas when he speaks to him, and the more they speak, the more you feel it coming: Jim is one of his stars, one of his bombs, and he's finally going to explode.

Maybe you'll go on. _M_ for Moriarty, _M_ for Moran, and wouldn't that be a fitting ending to the story?

Jim does love a good story. He spins stories like spider webs, trapping, ensnaring, unraveling at will. The detective and the criminal, though – that's more than a story.

That's biblical.

You wonder, sometimes, in self-preservative flashes of terror, where exactly you fit in, which role _you've_ been cast to play. Jim doesn't just play one role, of course, he's constantly switching and altering performances, but _you_ —you're no actor. No star, certainly no hero. A villain, maybe, maybe you could play a villain, but nobody plays villains better than Jim and he'd only ever upstage you, chewing through the scenery faster than your bullets.

So maybe you're a piece and not a player. _Second_ most dangerous, _second_ in command. It's alright, you think. Jim can have the spotlight if he leaves you his shadow.

Somewhere in the dark, a tiger bites.


End file.
